New Crown Center paper looks at Palestinians who favored partition

The dominant narrative of the partition of the Palestine mandate posits that the Palestinians uniformly rejected the idea of dividing the territory.

In a new Working Paper from the Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Abigail Jacobson demonstrates that in 1943 a small Palestinian movement -- the leftist National Liberation League -- embraced partition. The paper examines the brief history of the NLL with the aim of offering a more complex perspective of both mandatory Palestine and Palestinian rejection of partition.

Jacobson also reveals the ways in which the NLL, though forgotten in history, anticipated many of the arguments that decades later led other Palestinian nationalists to embrace partition. Additionally, the paper explores ways in which concepts of identity, nationalism, class and ethnicity were conceptualized, debated and contested during a time of national conflict and anti-imperialist struggle, and highlights tensions between ideology and practice, and between nationalism and internationalism.